{"id":6448,"date":"2011-03-10T17:21:25","date_gmt":"2011-03-10T22:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com?p=6448"},"modified":"2011-03-10T19:02:55","modified_gmt":"2011-03-11T00:02:55","slug":"the_decline_of_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/10\/the_decline_of_1\/","title":{"rendered":"The decline of Hindi among American brown folk"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"southas.png\"A few days ago Taz pointed me to the fact that Census 2010 had been releasing a lot more data in the past few months. I was naturally curious, so I decided to check out the website. Mind you, I’m someone rather familiar with the older website, and have downloaded raw data sets and crunched them with R<\/a>. So I was cautiously optimistic. Very cautiously. Apparently the big news is that the American Factfinder<\/a> now has a “web 2.0” version<\/a> which will be releasing 2010 count data. Unfortunately, the implementation of AJAX makes the site very, very, slow (and beware of non-supported browsers!). And, there isn’t that much 2010 information.<\/p>\n\n

To review, there are decennial censuses which are straightforward counts, and, since the aughts there have been American Community Survey<\/a> results which are based on a sample, and so have a margin of error (this makes county-level data less useful because for small subpopulations within a county the margin of error can be very large). I’m looking forward to 2010 results because they are going to be much more robust than the ACS data which makes the news periodically for small subgroups. You can see where I’m going with this, since the core readership of this weblog comes from a group which is itself subdivided by nationality, ethnicity, class, and religion.<\/p>\n\n

Though the initial intent was to find 2010 results for Indian Americans which I could compare across the older censuses, I stumbled onto some interesting language data. The pie chart is based on 2006-2008 ACS data. I’ve put a \ncsv file of the data online<\/a>. For the pie chart I removed some languages with less than 1,000 claimed speakers. The original data can be found here<\/a>. The sample was limited to those aged 5 and over. If these data are correct ~2.25 million Americans spoke indigenous South Asian languages at home in the second half of the aughts.But what about the title? Well, I found data for selected South Asian languages from 1980 to 2000. And therein one can find an interesting pattern. I have placed the csv online<\/a>. You can find the full table here<\/a>. Note that these tables apply only to foreign born individuals.<\/b> Again, age 5 and older. For South Asians this is actually pretty close to the total population, as contrary to the readership of this weblog, the national communities are still mostly first generation immigrant in composition, and biased toward people in the 30something age bracket.<\/p>\n\n

\"lang1b.png\"\"lang2b.png\"\"lang3b.png\"<\/p>\n\n

Unfortunately, Hindi and Urdu are not disaggregated for the first two censuses, so it’s a moot point to compare these two individually. I believe that the greater increase in Pakistani Americans from a lower population base (relatively) in 1980 has probably masked an even greater proportionate<\/i> decline in native-language Hindi speech. Of course, this masks the opposite trend which I’ve seen anecdotally, the picking up of Hindi phrases and terms by Indian Americans whose parents came from non-Hindi speaking regions, whose first language is English. The rise in Bengali is probably in part due to the greater percentage growth of Bangladeshis in the USA since 1980. Last I checked the Census 2000 had about ~60,000 people with some Bangladeshi heritage. There were nearly 2 million people of at least partial Indian heritage, 200,000 Pakistanis, 25,000 Sri Lankans and 10,000 Nepalis.<\/p>\n\n

Someone with more time than I could probably figure out what proportion of South Asian Americans have English as their first language at home. This would include people who are born and raised here, as well as those in inter-language families (though I presume that Hindi’s popularity among Gujarati and Punjabi speakers would mitigate this trend). Overall it looks like a substantial minority of South Asians already habitually speak English at home as their first language, irrespective of natality.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few days ago Taz pointed me to the fact that Census 2010 had been releasing a lot more data in the past few months. I was naturally curious, so I decided to check out the website. Mind you, I’m … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":503,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6448"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/503"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}